Reply to My Critics
- Reply to My Critics
I am very grateful to Catherine Jones, Andrew Sabl, and Mikko Tolonen for taking the trouble to read my book Hume: An Intellectual Biography so carefully, and for responding to it so thoughtfully and constructively. I thank the editors of Hume Studies for the honour of having the book discussed in the journal that matters most to any Hume scholar. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank the organisers of the 2017 Hume Society Conference in Providence, and especially Aaron Garrett and André Willis, for inviting me to take part in a discussion of the book there. My critics on that occasion were James Moore and Dario Perinetti, both of whom gave me much to think about. Before I begin my responses to Jones, Sabl, and Tolonen, I feel that I need to draw the attention of the reader to the fact that what is at issue here is a book that was published in 2015. I finished work on it, in fact, in the autumn of 2014. As I write, that is almost seven years ago, and since then I have continued to think about the character and shape of Hume's intellectual development. Indeed, I have in the meantime written another book about Hume.1 This new book is much shorter. It does not differ from the earlier book in any very significant way, but there are nevertheless some things that I have changed my mind about, and so it is possible that my replies to my critics here say more about my current views than about the views I held as I wrote the book under discussion. I hope that this does not make my critics feel that I am guilty of moving the goalposts while the game is still being played.
Reply to Jones
One of the things that I was most interested in as I wrote Hume: An Intellectual Biography was how to characterize what might be termed Hume's literary persona. I wanted to find a [End Page 37] way of describing what, in some languages, would be called his authorship, the nature of his ambition as a writer, how he addressed his readers, the voice he adopted in his appeal to their attention.2 I was sure that a clear and categorical distinction needed to be made between Hume's literary persona and the characteristic ambitions, and mode of address, of the Anglophone philosopher of today. Of course, Hume thought of himself as philosopher, and often engaged with his reader as a philosopher, but, it seemed—and still seems—to me, it would be a serious mistake to assume without reflection that the kind of thing Hume understood philosophy to be was the same as the kind of thing we understand philosophy to be now. My suggestion, at any rate, was that "philosophy" was for Hume more a style of thought, and of writing, than a discrete subject matter, and that the best way to understand his project as a writer is to see him as taking up the persona of the "man of letters" and attempting to give that persona a distinctively philosophical inflection. I am very glad that Catherine Jones accepts this as a fruitful way of characterizing Hume's authorship. What she makes clear in her comments is that there is much more to say than I said in the book about the history of the man of letters, and much more to say also about Hume's particular version of this literary persona.
I suggest in my book that, as a way of bringing Hume's literary ambitions into clearer focus, it is helpful to compare and contrast them with his almost exact contemporary Samuel Johnson. Both sought a kind of independence and autonomy that it had not been possible for authors in English to achieve before the eighteenth century—though both had before them the example of Alexander Pope, and the way he dramatically altered the balance of power between author and bookseller. Money was, of course, the key to independence, but money mattered in very different ways to Hume and Johnson, and Jones is quite right...
